Well, this week brought another series of murders in the name of “The Religion of Peace”. These acts of savagery have become regrettably commonplace, but the reaction was different this time, because our betters, the relativist preachers and lecturers of the media were kin to those brutally murdered to avenge the honor of a god and prophet too impotent to tend to his own vengeance. The chaos and confliction endemic to our “thought leaders” was telling.

We witnessed large media outlets publicly take pains to be careful how they reported the story, out of fear of offending people who have a nasty and largely unchecked habit of killing anyone who offends them…in other words, pretty much anyone else. Despite the near toxic irony of these media outlets being in a business that relies of the freedom of expression, including the freedom not only to offend, but to gore sacred cows with impunity, this was unsurprising, as these same outlets have been willing participants in a movement to shame, ostracize, and ultimately silence others who “offend” those who have been deemed by our betters to be beyond the reproach, criticism, questioning or mockery of others. While the New York Times, MSNBC, and social justice warriors in every walk of society haven’t yet taken to killing those who have offended their delicate sensibilities with words, they have displayed absolutely NO reluctance to use their fainting couches as bludgeons against anyone who dares to utter anything that they deem unworthy of being said. While cries of “racism” are the general default silencer, they have been unafraid to use “intolerance” and “white privilege”, and “______phobia” as well.

I would like to say that I’ve enjoyed seeing the bludgeon of “offense” used against the very people who have brought this perversion of our fundamental freedoms into favor, but I can’t. Instead, I’m infuriated. As a white Christian male, husband, and father, it has been open season on me, in my own culture, for most of my life.

And in response, I HAVE KILLED NO ONE.

I haven’t killed sitcom writers, who portray me as a bumbling idiot, worthy of derision from my wife, and contempt from my children.

I haven’t killed self-designated feminists, who seek to blame me for the oppression of women in a society in which I could, and have, worked for women, and in which I have known them as intellectual and spiritual equals.

I haven’t killed African-Americans, despite the ubiquitous claims of my personal practice of oppression, or enjoyment of it because “racism” and “white privilege” from racist grievance pimps, race hustlers, and their willing accomplices in academia and the media.

I haven’t murdered schoolchildren and other innocents, or suffered a massive psychotic break, despite believing in the Second Amendment and deeply resenting government’s numerous violations of it, and intrusions on to my right to bear arms, and the portrayal of myself and others who hold such beliefs by opportunistic politicians, media figures, and “academics”, as a wackjob and loon.

I haven’t killed those who maintain that I, and others like me are “bitterly clinging” to our Bibles and guns, and that we are members of an oppressive religion. In fact, for a member of an “oppressive religion”, I am a failure, a characteristic I share with many others like me, as we haven’t “persecuted” anyone, despite continued infringement of our First Amendment rights by our own government, and a judiciary determined to ignore history, re-write the Constitution, and impose an interpretation of ten tortured words that would be completely foreign to those who penned them, and the man misquoted and misapplied to invoke this bizarro conception of what they had wrought.

If we were to compare grievances, I’ve just demonstrated that the “offences” to me, and others like me far exceed the followers of Islam, who “unexpectedly” are at the heart of every act of bloody savagery committed for the honor of a religion or its prophet in our world today. And yet, here I stand, not yet having beheaded a single person, or not strapping on a bomb, and detonating it, and myself in a public place,and not attacking another religion’s house of worship…such as a Buddhist temple, synagogue, cathedral, or even the offices of NPR or the New York Times ( I wouldn’t want our secular humanist brethren to feel left out). This isn’t an accident; this is by design.

Because our betters have been so successful in using the fainting couch to cow us into creating a right “not to be offended” out of whole cloth, and elevating it to a position where it is far superior to all other rights, they have created their own gag, and contributed to the Barbarian’s belief that they are entitled to act like Barbarians, without thought or concern to consequences for doing so. They have contributed to the “easy” response. I’m not shocked, in the era of hashtag “diplomacy”, that I’m seeing “Je suis Charlie” all over the web. But I’m not impressed. The Fourth Estate surrendered its legitimacy, and surrendered its duty as a stalwart defender of freedom of expression. It did this when it tried to stifle speech, rather than engage in it. It did this when it tried to shut down the marketplace of ideas, rather than compete in it. It did this when it exceeded its authority and tried to make a new right, not defend the ones central to their purpose. And because they did this, they conceded our rights to the Barbarians. They gave the enemies of civilization a veto. And if civilization is to survive, we are going to have to step up, and do what our self-appointed betters no longer have the courage to do.

If your god commands that you kill to defend his honor, he’s a pretty impotent god.

If your god tells you that anyone who doesn’t believe in you is worthy of any punishment you care to make them suffer, he is a petty and impotent god.

If your god demands that you kill anyone who leaves his service, he’s a bloodthirsty and impotent god.

If your god has offered to reward murders in his name by giving you other humans for your pleasure in the afterlife, he is a barbaric and impotent god.

If you believe that it is your duty and obligation to behead those who insult Islam, then you are not worthy of the company of human beings.

And if you would use the tolerance and conventions of civilization as a means to infiltrate and undermine society until you have the numbers to assert yourself by bloodshed, then you deserve an extreme segregation from civilization that must be exacted to make it happen…until you learn, or until you aren’t a threat to others.

1. Progressivism sees the ultimate aim of government as the removal or mitigation of consequences for those it has deliberately enslaved with gilded shackles.

2. Logic has no place in the actions of government. You MUST believe that deportation is physically impossible, but verification of tax status and criminal background checks for the very same people can be accomplished with the wave of a wand.

3. “New tones” and “civility” only apply to discourse directed toward the monarch and his prerogatives; he will be as insulting, as condescending, and as reckless with the truth as he likes. He may impugn the character of his opponents, and assassinate any character he choses without acknowledging that he never had a right to claim the moral high ground that he has. And if you expect something different, that’s your problem, not his.

4. Breaking the law should never be rewarded, unless the Monarch deems it proper to do so.

5. Redefining terms and words in order to rhetorically spin dross into gold is acceptable linguistic alchemy.

6. Claiming cover based on the actions of predecessors whom you have reviled and disrespected at every turn isn’t despicable and toxically ironic when the Monarch does it.

7. If Congress doesn’t pass a law that the Monarch wants, the Monarch can refuse to enforce the law that exists…and such a trick is capable of repetition.

When I was a young man, about a week or so out from high school graduation, my friends and I piled in a Suburban and went up north to Hammond Bay for a few days of sailing and fishing. On the second day, we all woke up, and everyone was eager to get on the boat and do some sailing. Except me. I could smell rain, and I suggested that we wait. After some grumbling back and forth, we agreed to go over to the port, and hang out there for a while. I grabbed my fishing pole and went to the end of the pier. I sat there, casting my line out, and slowly reeling it in, while watching the sky along the coastline to the north.

After about ten minutes, one of my friends sat down next to me and was doing the same. We sat there, casting, reeling, and looking north, while listening to the sound of the reels and the rising waves. Twenty minutes later, we could see a wall of rain about a mile off to the north. The wind picked up, and a small power boat came into the middle of the harbor, dropped anchor, and zipped everything up. “It’s raining pretty hard up there.” my friend observed. “Yup.” was my only reply. The casting and reeling continued for another twenty minutes. The wind was blowing harder, the temperature had dropped, and the wall of rain was only a half mile or so away. My friend looked up and said “It’s raining pretty hard up there.” I looked up, and said “Yup.”, and continued to cast and reel. Ten minutes passed. Two more boats came in, and tied up, their passengers rushing off to their cars waiting in the parking lot. The wall of rain was now less than a quarter mile away. My friend stopped reeling, and stared at the rain as he said “It’s raining pretty hard up there.” I stopped, and shivered in the wind as I regarded the rapidly approaching wall of rain. “Yup.” was my only reply.

Three minutes later, a raindrop the size of a half-dollar slammed into my forehead, followed by another. And another. We got up and ran as hard as we could for the Suburban, but in the minute or so it took us to get there, we were drenched.

Why am I telling you this story? Because our government is doing the same thing.

Just as it was utterly predictable that we would get wet if we didn’t react to the obvious threat, our government refused to react to the obvious threat of a terrible disease, and suspend air travel from the affected area in west Africa, and the inevitable happened. It flew in with a passenger from the affected area. And while that passenger has since passed, he didn’t do so without infecting Americans with a disease that has a 70% mortality rate, according to the new data from the World Health Organization.

The government, facing the obvious question, has decided that rather than stopping the flights now, it is imperative to keep these flights going, because stopping them will make us less safe from the virus. This causes anyone with three brain cells and the knowledge that England and France (FRANCE!!!) believe otherwise to stifle a collective “That’s quite possibly the dumbest thing we’ve ever heard.” , but actually, this makes a perverse sort of sense when you consider that this excuse originates in the same town where not spending more on an agency or program than we spent last year is somehow a “cut”.

The fact is that a travel ban from West Africa would lead to questions about other immigration…and those questions would lead to questions about Enterovirus 68, which has killed several American children, and the emergence of which corresponds to the resettlement of all the “children” from south of border. (Unexpectedly!) and then people would be questioning an ideological touchstone of this Administration for reasons that could not logically be defined as “racist”. And they can’t have that. The illusion of the naked emperor’s resplendent garb is simply too precious, especially to the emperor himself. Protecting the first failure, which ignores the wisdom of previous generations who saw the wisdom in health screenings as a condition of entry into this country, means committing more errors, which will, in turn, cost more American lives.

To combat this obvious failure, which would even cause Helen Keller to say “What the hell…?”, the meme has been floated that being concerned about this silly, given that tobacco, alcohol, and obesity kill tens of thousands more in this country annually, so being concerned this government’s stubborn insistence to continue to allow people from affected areas to travel to this country and potentially infect Americans with a dread disease with a 71% mortality rate that heretofore was unseen among our population is somehow foolish “panicking”. “Panic” is of course, hyperbole. Panic is afoot in this nation today, but it is found in the offices of Democratic incumbents seeking re-election to the United States Senate, not among the average American who realizes that common sense and logic are being deliberately suppressed in favor of purely political considerations that have already needlessly cost the lives of Americans, and place countless others at risk

It isn’t panic that most Americans feel about this, it is ANGER. Justifiable, controlled, and focused ANGER.

And when the response is to draw comparisons to other causes of death, such as from alcohol, tobacco, and obesity, they have a right to be even angrier, as the lyric “One of these things is different from the other/One of these things is different from the rest.” plays loudly in the radio of their minds. The fact is that we are all dying, a little bit each day, and for most Americans, these causes are also incremental. They kill, but because they are patient, and slow, they feel like they are contributing factors, and not direct causes. And more importantly, they are the result of choices WE make, not choices that our government refuses to make. That is the difference, and it is an even greater irritant when we consider the steps that government takes to “protect” us from these incremental harms. Minimum ages in order purchase the products. Taxes to discourage purchase. PSAs. Fitness and nutrition programs. Millions and millions of dollars spent annually to “protect” us from cutting off the years we would otherwise spend in wheelchairs, warehoused in a “home” somewhere, staring off into space, exhausting our resources, and more commonly, the taxpayers’ money, and yet this same government, afraid to threaten a source of new votes purchased with our money refuses to take common sense measures to reduce the number of Americans exposed to and infected with a disease that will cause fever, liquefied internal organs, seizures, and death while bleeding out of every orifice, all in a span of days. That kind of dual-mindedness would hopelessly confuse Bob Arctor.

And when the government decides to do “something”, it is to appoint a political hack to “take the point” (and the blame) for an executive who’d rather be golfing, until it’s time to blame someone for the inevitable failures.

We have a right to be angry. And they are the ones who should be panicking.

The words of a Facebook acquaintance hung there on the group page, taunting my mind away from a more basic Sunday morning meditation. It worked, and my mind started milling the words, prompting my immediate rejoinder “If that were true, it would work for everyone, non?”

But the more I thought about it, the more I came to consider the “wrongness” that lead to the statement being made in the first place. I realized that it isn’t about the rank hypocrisy that sees nothing wrong with an entitlement for some people to invoke “offense” as a means to stop discussion, debate, questions, behavior or beliefs they do not like, but is incapable of even considering that other parties might be offended by the discussion, debate, questions, behavior or beliefs of the those invoking “offense”, let alone capable of invoking “offense” themselves.

Don’t get me wrong. I think being able to end all discussion, debate, questions, behavior, or beliefs by claiming to be “offended” is unhealthy for a free society, offensive to liberty, and childish in the extreme. As long as it is impossible to have an honest conversation, because it will almost certainly “offend” someone, it will be impossible to address any issue of import. It doesn’t take long before this will lead to financial impairment, social impairment, and impairment of national security. (See President Obama, Second Term)

But the really, really odious part if this is that I often hear “Offense” uttered like an incantation from many of the same people who speak of “reason” being superior to faith, and a basis for them to assume an intellectual superiority that they clearly haven’t earned, while they often put faith in “facts” that have expiration dates due to constantly changing nature of scientific paradigms. The illogic of presuming that rights which are guaranteed by law are subject to override if only they can apply their completely subjective responses to the exercise of those rights would be laughable if it wasn’t pursued with such zeal and dedication. Orwell himself couldn’t have conceived of the sheer scope of the vanity and delusion that have combined to impose a bizzaro-world rhetoric to such a degree that sincerity and directness are relegated to criminal status.

The saddest aspect to this current state of affairs is that too many of us allowed ourselves to be cowed by this practice, as if offending someone, or at least those granted a de facto privileged status by the arbiters of acceptability, is a combination of the worst sin and the worst crime that a person can commit. The fact is that this extraordinary power and cancer on society wouldn’t be powerful at all if we didn’t let it. But this requires a boldness to push back, that too few have the backbone to exhibit. Start responding by saying “SO???” Ask them to explain why they are suffering from the alleged “offense”. Put the onus on them to prove why it should matter to you, and to everyone else, rather than giving what has morphed into a generic and reflexive complaint the presumption of legitimacy without the burden of proving it. It is your duty as a citizen and a member of society to engage people who don’t want you to engage in an honest discourse. It is your birthright to be able to do so without the threat of sanction by government, or those who want to destroy the very way you live, and censor your very thoughts.

“The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.”–Jim Hightower

“To see the right and not to do it is cowardice.”–Confucius

So if impeachment simply isn’t an option, because those in Congress are afraid of losing their jobs because they might actually DO their jobs, then why bother with the ongoing investigations of the weaponizing of the IRS, of Benghazi, and of Fast and Furious? Seriously. If you’re willing to let an Executive usurp your power with his pen and his phone without lawful and rightful consequence provided for in the Constitution, then why pretend that anything else done by government on his behalf (and likely at his behest) is of any consequence?

And if we have so many of our “countrymen” willing to clap and cheer an Executive all but DARING Congress to publicly wallow in it’s impotence in the face of this brazen flouting of our most basic law, do we really have a common ground with those who willingly trade their sovereignty and lawful authority for a despot bearing “gifts” paid for by others?

Seriously, if Congress is willing to neuter itself in order to avoid a confrontation over whether we are going to be a nation of laws or a nation of [small, petty, vindictive] “men”, then the coup is complete, and every day that passes in which no one in authority is willing to publicly pronounce this brings us closer to the purge which must inevitably follow. And if we can expect no courage now from the ones we have elected to be our voices, we have no right to expect any from our neighbors on that black day.

One can only hope that the deepest, darkest, hottest reaches of Hell are reserved for those who could have taken a stand, and instead decided that they only needed to be courageous as soon as we elected enough others like them, for the future of freedom itself rested upon their slight shoulders, and either by a lack of character, or just weak ones, they shrugged.

So I heard President Sub Par on the news at lunch making all sorts of demands in relation to the Malaysian Air shoot down…a cease fire in the area between all parties, access to the crash site for investigators, blah, blah, blah blah, and all I could think was “Who does he think he’s kidding?”

During his tenure in the Oval Office, he’s squandered any authority that the Presidency might have still carried over from his infinitely more qualified predecessors, and has done his best to ensure that he has built none of his own. I physically cringe whenever I hear this pretender adopt the manner of an irritated professor, and presume to lecture anyone, let alone foreign leaders who have already tested him, only to learn that the force of his conviction will never take him any farther than he can comfortably hear his own voice and the approval of his reality-challenged sycophants.

It scares me that he can walk out in front of cameras and the presstitute corpse, and pretend that he’s really felt all along that the shoot down was an “outrage of unspeakable proportions” when yesterday, while in campaign mode, he spent all of less than a minute to pontificate that it “may be a terrible tragedy”, before launching back into a scripted speech that contained a number of attempts at jokes. Anyone observing the Great Narcissus for any period of time at all would have to wonder if he at least waited until he got off the podium before he could concentrate on how Presidential and Important he looked, or how he could get his golf handicap down.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. As a President, he is most unserious man to ever hold the office. His ME-centric approach to all things domestic and foreign is embarrassing, as is his contempt for the America that was worthwhile and a beacon of hope to people all around the world. When he offered his unsolicited opinion on the events in Israel, I was not surprised by what I heard. Much like his criticism of the Cambridge Police revealed his willingness to weigh in on that matter without having a clue what he was talking about, his comments about the need for Israel to “show restraint” revealed to the world that he either hasn’t bothered with his security briefings (something REAL Presidents get out of bed in the morning and attend before going to do actual work), or that he didn’t pay attention to any briefing given. Either way, he is an embarrassment and the primary reason for our current tarnished prestige in the world today. I find myself somewhat disheartened when I hear some pundits try to craft an analogy that would serve to make the situation clear to anyone capable of logic independent of ideology. “What if it was Mexico lobbing missiles in at U.S cities?” they ask. I just shake my head. “How is that different from allowing passage through their country to ours by a wave of people utterly willing to break our laws as if it is their right to do so?” I ask in reply. If President Selfie didn’t want to go see the chaos on the border himself when he had a chance, because he didn’t “want a photo-op”, why do you think that other threats to this country would affect him in any meaningful way? He doesn’t understand America. Whether it’s been “at some point, you’ve just made enough money” or berating citizens who “bitterly cling to their Bibles and guns” or his curiously selective recitations of the Declaration of Independence or his fundamental mischaracterization of American exceptionalism, he revels in demonstrating that he doesn’t get this country. If it were Mexico lobbing missiles at American cities, I’m sure that he would summon members of La Raza and Mecha to the White House so he could publicly and abjectly apologize to them “on behalf of all Americans” and then try to find a way to surrender to them. For him, the only times tragedies happen is when someone asks him a real question and he just wants to finish his waffle, when he is asked a question he’ll pretend is above his pay grade, despite his previous expressions of clear opinions addressing the matter from another side, or when his subjects expect him to do his job and he just wants to enjoy his taxpayer-funded Hawaiian vacation.

Like previous expressions of outrage, and breathlessly declared red lines, I expect nothing will come today’s remarks. After all, we’ll soon be paying for yet another lavish vacation on Martha’s Vineyard for him and his family, far away from the relocation centers all over the country where the last stage of ICE’s “Catch and Release” kabuki theatre is being played out. Besides, he has more important things to worry about. Like the nagging grocery carts his wife wants to put in our grocery stores around the country…because it would be impossible for us to properly feed ourselves without her enlightened guidance. They only have to make sure we do what they say, and not what they do.

I’m ashamed to admit that I was amused for a bit. When the Hobby Lobby decision was first handed down, the deluge of butthurt and really bad analysis from the Left was entertaining. It offered a glimpse into a mindset that has been wrongly conditioned to think that religion was something confined to various buildings dotting the landscape of the country for a few hours a week…a diversion for people not smart enough to take advantage of an opportunity to sleep in, rather than a deeply held conviction that guides the actions of those who believe, and that as such, will be expressed in the actions taken by the holders of those beliefs, including what they do, and what government may try to force them to do, with their own property.

But the howls continued. The vitriol continued. And expressions of hatred were aired without restraint or condemnation, once again giving lie to the Left’s own sermonizing about civility and tolerance.

As a student of history, I wasn’t disturbed by the Hobby Lobby ruling, because it brought about the correct result. I was disturbed by the fact that it wasn’t a unanimous ruling, which in and of itself shows just how far we have strayed from first principles. And as the wailing and gnashing of teeth continued to grow into a low roar, fueled by ignorance and indigence that someone should be allowed to dissent and not participate in the high holy sacrament of killing unborn children, I saw yet more confirmation of a clash of beliefs being perpetrated by a creed that is still inexplicably permitted to masquerade as value neutral, when it is nothing of the sort. Secularism as practiced today has death at its heart, and as such it can be nothing but a cancer that is embraced and nurtured by too many in society until the tumor in our collective head has grown so large that it threatens the very nature of who we are as a people. Our society still utters the expressions of freedom, but does so in contradiction to the convictions that inform our actions. These soulless supplications are offered both as ruse, and rebuke, intended to convince the less vigilant among us that there is no cause for alarm, and to portray the watchmen as hysterical and ridiculous. And in this climate, usurpations and entitlements are magically and mystically transmogrified into “rights”,while real rights, which government is obligated to protect and defend, are consigned to wither and fade in the shadow of the “rights” “given” (and protected by nothing other than) by the artifice and caprice of government, which is more interested in redistributing private property and the bounty earned by it, than in defending it.

A healthy society is one that understands that morality is a cultural necessity. No society has long lasted when every man has done right in his own eyes, without a common frame of reference to which everyone can refer. Government works best when it accepts and codifies those guard rails which delineate the boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not. It is an unhealthy society which rejects what has been shown to have value, and provide a framework that allows society to grow and thrive, in favor of a government that assumes the mantle of moral authority based on what it determines is true, is right, and is acceptable, because there is no anchor for any of these determinations other than the desires of 50% +1. Some may say that this sickness is a product of the 20th Century. I’ve come to understand that the body politic has been infected with this particular hubris from much longer, but I do think that it accelerated, at an exponential rate, in the 20th Century.

The standing complaint of human degeneracy remains against us. Causes have been operating—and of late years with fearful rapidity and strength—to produce a state of moral obliquity and practical atheism among us, appalling in magnitude and of alarming consequence. It has become of late quite customary to sneer at the Puritanism of our fathers, and to speak with contempt of the severity of their manners and the bigotry of their faith. This impious treatment, by the present corrupters of society, of a generation of men whose lofty principles and illustrious virtues they seem utterly unable to comprehend, is well adapted to not only arouse the deepest indignation, but to excite the most lively concern. There are two quarters from which these evil influences chiefly proceed. A class of men without conscience, and reckless of all moral restraint, have gained ascendancy in the public favor, and assume from their prominent position to mould and direct the public sentiment of the nation. Their general influence upon the public morals has been like the wind of the desert, –poisonous, withering, and destructive. Another and very large class of men moving in the lower walks of life form a significant element of our American population, whose hard and vicious instincts , gratified without compunction and paraded everywhere in the most offensive manner, would seem to render them well-nigh incapable of reformation. Apparently insensible to all the nobler sentiments of public morality and virtue, and ever ready to perform their congenial part in the general demoralization the demand that all the higher classes shall pander to their depraved appetites, as the price of their patronage and support. In this reciprocal play of the baser passions the common principles of morality are daily sacrificed, and the strong and the weak join hands in carrying down the nation to the very verge of ruin. No man can observe the conditions of society in our country, and the obvious impulses of human conduct, without feeling that the perils against which the fathers warned us, and which have so faithfully and constantly pointed out ministers of religion, have, not withstanding, increased at a fearful rate, without seeing the most alarming departures from the standard of individual rectitude and social integrity have occurred among us within the century that is past.
—Byron Sunderland, Washington D.C., April 14, 1863.

And now we have come to a point where a vocal segment of society have decided that a recognition that someone else’s right to not participate in the use of a substance or device that they personally find repugnant to their faith should be subordinate to government’s “ability” to make them pay for another’s choice to use such substance or device. We have come to that point where a recognition of the right of conscience is considered to be a “denial of access” and abridgement of the recipient’s “right to choose” with their benefactors money. And those who protest loudest because they see in this recognition a threat to a river of blood money so long and casually extorted from the taxpayer feel absolutely no guilt in their perversion of terms and concepts in their efforts to gin up outrage against the affirmation of the obvious, which is still obviously stated, and has remained such in a more than a century’s worth of a campaign of deception and subversion by their own design, because honesty in their intentions never would have obtained the support they otherwise enjoyed.

"I want these “…and I’m a communist” dumbshits to have a Coming to Jesus moment that they will NEVER forget. I want them staring in to the eyes of every American who knows that government has very specifically designated roles, and are fed-up to their eyeballs with the overeaching, paternalistic, oppressive monster that the Left (with help from the establishment Right) set loose on us. I want those greedy, lazy, control-freaky bastards quaking with fear when they are met with an electorate determined to wrest their liberties, including the right to fail, back from a government that would enslave us all to the service of a soul-killing mediocrity. I want their asses so horrifiyingly and memorably whipped that the mere memory will cow a century’s worth of socialist/communist/marxist acoyltes into an ashamed silence."
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"When a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we no longer have a Constitution, we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is according to their own views of what it ought to mean."--Justice Curtis, Dissent, Dred Scott v. Sanford

"The very idea of power, and the right of the people to establish government, presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established Government. All obstructions to the execution of its laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberations and actions of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency."- George Washington

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.
-Plato

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
-Plato